Enterprise Property Rights, Manager Background Characteristics and Cost Stickiness: An Empirical Study Based on Manufacturing Listed Companies

Abstract

Cost control is essential to enterprises' profits. Since the foreign scholars found that the existence of cost stickiness, the problem has become a hot topic of scholars, and more and more business managers pay attention to. The study of cost stickiness helps managers to deepen their understanding of the cost behavior of the firm, thus implementing more effective control. The causes of cost stickiness are mainly subjective adjustments to cost costs by managers, and the different background of the managers and the nature of the property rights of the enterprises may affect the manager's cost management decision. Therefore, this article distinguishes between state-owned enterprises and non-state enterprises, from the perspective of the characteristics of managers to explore the impact of cost sticky. Based on the analysis of principal-agent theory and high-level ladder theory and the results of domestic and foreign research, this paper investigates the influence of managers' background characteristics on cost stickiness as a research sample from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share manufacturing listed companies in 2009 and 2015, and further, this paper analyzes the differences between the background characteristics of state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises managers on the cost stickiness. This study found that China's manufacturing companies do exist in the cost of sticky, the cost of state-owned enterprises is stronger than non-state enterprises. In non-state-owned enterprises, age and tenure have a significant inhibitory effect on cost stickiness, and education has a significant effect on cost stickiness. In state-owned enterprises, the degree of age-to-cost cohesion is equal to that of non-state enterprises, and the effect of reinforcement on cost stickiness is weaker than that of non-state enterprises, but the term has no significant effect on cost stickiness. At the same time, executives' financial experience has had no significant impact on cost stickiness in both state and nonstate enterprises. This study not only enriches the background of manager's background on the study of cost sticky research, but also has some reference for the selection of senior management.